---
license: apache-2.0
pretty_name: Neuron Lab maps
viewer: false
tags:
- interpretability
- neurons
- steering
---

# Neuron Lab maps

These are maps of what single neurons do inside open language models. For each neuron, we pushed it up and down and recorded which next words became more likely. The [Neuron Lab](https://github.com/oEdyb/neuron-lab) explorer downloads these files.

The Qwen and Gemma maps are here now. The Ministral map is made but **not uploaded yet**.

This dataset contains measurements. It contains no model weights. Neuron Lab is an independent project by Olle Dyberg and is **not affiliated with, sponsored by or endorsed by** Alibaba Cloud or the Qwen team, Google or Google DeepMind, Mistral AI, or the authors of any model named here. Their names appear only to say where the measurements came from.

## The three maps

| Folder | Model measured | Made by | Text layers | Neurons mapped |
|---|---|---|---:|---:|
| `Qwen3.5-2B/` | [Qwen/Qwen3.5-2B](https://huggingface.co/Qwen/Qwen3.5-2B) | Qwen team, Alibaba Cloud | 24 | 147,456 |
| `gemma-4-E2B-it/` | [google/gemma-4-E2B-it](https://huggingface.co/google/gemma-4-E2B-it) | Google DeepMind | 35 | 337,920 |
| `Ministral-3-3B-Instruct-2512/` (not uploaded yet) | [mistralai/Ministral-3-3B-Instruct-2512-BF16](https://huggingface.co/mistralai/Ministral-3-3B-Instruct-2512-BF16) | Mistral AI | 26 | 239,616 |

Anything below about Ministral describes our local copy, not files you can download here.

## Licenses and credit

All three models are released under Apache 2.0. We publish this dataset under Apache 2.0 too, and the full text is at the end of this card. Whether measurement data like this legally counts as a derivative work is unsettled. We follow the license's conditions either way.

**Qwen3.5-2B.** Its model card says `license: apache-2.0` and links its `LICENSE` file, which carries this notice:

> Copyright 2026 Alibaba Cloud

The card asks: "If you find our work helpful, feel free to give us a cite." Citation: Qwen Team, *Qwen3.5: Towards Native Multimodal Agents*, February 2026, <https://qwen.ai/blog?id=qwen3.5>.

**Gemma 4 E2B-it.** Its model card says:

> License: Apache 2.0 | Authors: Google DeepMind

The license link goes to Google's [Apache License 2.0 page for Gemma](https://ai.google.dev/gemma/apache_2). The card also says: "If you find our work helpful, please consider citing it." Citation: Gemma Team, *Gemma 4 Technical Report*, 2026, [arXiv:2607.02770](https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.02770).

Google's older [Gemma Prohibited Use Policy](https://ai.google.dev/gemma/prohibited_use_policy) (last modified 21 February 2024) is still online and says "Gemma or Model Derivatives" without naming a version. The Gemma 4 license page doesn't mention it. We couldn't confirm whether it applies to Gemma 4, so read it before building on the Gemma map.

**Ministral 3 3B.** Its model card says:

> This model is licensed under the Apache 2.0 License.
>
> *You must not use this model in a manner that infringes, misappropriates, or otherwise violates any third party’s rights, including intellectual property rights.*

We found no NOTICE file in any of the three model repositories, so there is no NOTICE text to carry over.

**Meaning search.** `vector-words.json.gz` and `word-vectors.bin` come from [sentence-transformers/paraphrase-multilingual-MiniLM-L12-v2](https://huggingface.co/sentence-transformers/paraphrase-multilingual-MiniLM-L12-v2), also Apache 2.0. Citation: Reimers and Gurevych, [*Sentence-BERT*](https://arxiv.org/abs/1908.10084), 2019.

All model names and trademarks belong to their owners.

## What we made and changed

We didn't copy or edit any model file. Every file here was generated by our own code, which loads the model and tokenizer, measures them, and writes the results. Copyright in that work: 2026 Olle Dyberg.

1. **Pushes.** Each neuron's outgoing weights (a column of the text decoder's `mlp.down_proj`) give a direction. We scaled it to 0.6 × the layer's median stream size, added it in both signs, and read the next-word probabilities. Each layer also got 64 random directions of the same size as a control.
2. **Prompts.** We wrote the eight prompts ourselves, listed below. The results are averaged across them, except where noted. No text dataset was used, so nothing here comes from a corpus or from anyone's personal messages. The templated prompts used each model's own chat template, with thinking turned off for Qwen and Gemma.
3. **Words.** We decoded the top token IDs back to text with each model's own tokenizer. So the files include small pieces of each tokenizer's vocabulary.
4. **Layout.** We placed neurons on a 2D map using PCA of the same `down_proj` columns.
5. **Web connections.** We estimated links between neurons from the weights alone, without running the model.

The eight prompts, as question then start of answer:

| Question | Answer starts with |
|---|---|
| Who are you? | I am a |
| How do you feel right now? | I feel |
| What do you think of me? | You are |
| What is the world like? | The world is |
| What do you love most? | My favorite thing is |
| Tell me about yourself. | (empty) |
| (none, plain text) | I think the most important thing to remember is |
| (none, plain text) | Today we are going to talk about |

Model details:

- **Qwen3.5-2B:** the map doesn't record a revision. `15852e8c` is the most likely one: it has been `main` since 2 March 2026 and is the copy cached on our machine.
- **Gemma 4 E2B-it:** audio and vision were disabled. The map doesn't record a revision. `3e22461f` is the most likely one: it was `main` when the map was uploaded and is the copy cached on our machine. Google changed the tokenizer on 3 November 2026 ("Remediate 233 glitch tokens"), after our upload, so a few decoded words may differ from what today's tokenizer gives.
- **Ministral 3 3B:** BF16 weights at revision `b6d637bef2393152b3da2b2fde72eecdee30557e`, text decoder only. We used the tokenizer's default system prompt and Transformers' `fix_mistral_regex=True` correction. The template's `{today}` and `{yesterday}` placeholders stayed unfilled, which differs from how Mistral's own runtime fills them.

## What's in each folder

| File | Contents |
|---|---|
| `manifest.json` | Model name, layer sizes, push size, and the 12 strongest neurons per layer |
| `L{layer}.bin` | Three little-endian 32-bit floats per neuron: map x, map y, and strength (the larger of KL ÷ control p95 across the two signs) |
| `L{layer}.json.gz` | `p95`, and one row per neuron, described below |
| `signed-search.json.gz` | Exact word search: each word mapped to the neurons and signs that list it |
| `signed-strength.bin` | One little-endian 32-bit float per neuron and sign: KL ÷ control p95 |
| `vector-words.json.gz` | The list of words used in that search |
| `word-vectors.bin` | One MiniLM vector per word, stored as 384 signed 8-bit numbers |
| `connections/manifest.json` | How the connections were computed |
| `connections/L{layer}.bin` | For each neuron, its 24 strongest upstream links, then 24 downstream. Each 6-byte record holds layer (`i1`), neuron (`<i2`), z-score (`<f2`) and sign (`i1`) |

Each row in `L{layer}.json.gz` holds two versions of every field, positive push first:

- `up` and `down`: the 12 words that gained the most log-probability, averaged over the prompts. `down` means words that rise under a negative push. It does not mean words that fall.
- `persona`: the 8 words that rose most on the first prompt only ("Who are you?" / "I am a").
- `kl`: KL divergence between pushed and normal next-word predictions, averaged over the prompts.
- `spread`: how far the push travelled at each layer, relative to stream size.

`p95` is the 95th percentile of `kl` among the random controls, per sign.

The per-prompt words, logit lens and raw token IDs are in our local raw maps. They aren't in this dataset.

Our local Ministral map has only the map and exact-search files. We haven't built its meaning search or Web connections, and its manifest says so under `capabilities`.

## Limits

- **These are next-word effects, not explanations.** The files show what pushing a neuron does to the very next word on eight prompts. They don't show when a neuron fires, or what it reads. There are no activations here.
- **A word list isn't a personality.** A neuron whose list looks "evil" may do nothing recognisable in a real reply, and a good one may break down at a higher push. Test by chatting before you claim anything. The dataset contains no labels, and nobody has checked most neurons by hand.
- **Eight prompts is few, and our choice of them shapes the results.** Most of them ask about identity or feelings.
- **Offensive text.** The word lists come straight from the models' vocabularies and include profanity and words about sexual violence, with no filtering.
- **Gemma's pushes are out of date.** The published Gemma map added the push before the layer's post-feedforward normalization, which caps its size. Our current code adds it after that step, so this map's numbers won't match Neuron Lab's current chat. Compare Gemma's `kl` values with other models' only with care.
- **Gemma's Web connections are the old version.** The published files scale by 1 + the norm weight, as their manifest shows, but Gemma multiplies by the weight itself. They also leave out the post-feedforward normalization that our current pushes go through. We've corrected both in our code but haven't rebuilt these files, so treat these links as unreliable.
- **Web connections are estimates.** They ignore attention, the activation function and input-dependent scaling.
- **Numbers vary a little.** Values are stored at reduced precision, and the maps ran on different hardware and code paths. Strength is relative to that layer's controls, so it isn't a universal scale.
- **No warranty.** This data comes as is, under the terms below.

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